The Desert and the Sown | Page 5

West Pointer, before he gets his commission, should serve a year or two in the ranks, to raise the type of the enlisted man, and chiefly, mark you, to get his point of view, the which he is to bear in mind when he comes to his command. Oh, we've had some pretty arguments! But I suspect the rascal of drawing it mild, at this stage, for the old dragon who guards his Golden Apple. He doesn't want to poke me up. How far he'd go if he were not hampered in his principles by the fact that he is in love, I cannot say. And I'd rather not imagine."
The commandant's house at Bisuka Barracks is the nearest one to the flag-pole as you go up a flight of wooden steps from the parade ground. These steps, and their landings, flanked by the dry grass terrace of the line, are a favorite gathering place for young persons of leisure at the Post. They face the valley and the mountains; they lead past the adjutant's office to the main road to town; they command the daily pageant of garrison duty as performed at such distant, unvisited posts, with only the ladies and the mountains looking on.
Retreat had sounded at half after five, for the autumn days grew short. The colonel's orderly had been dismissed to his quarters. There was no excuse, at this hour, for two young persons lingering in sentimental corners of the steps, beyond a flagrant satisfaction in the shadow thereof which covered them since the lighting of lamps on Officers' Row.
The colonel stood at his study window keeping his pipe alive with slow and dreamy puffs. The moon was just clearing the roof of the men's quarters. His eye caught a shape, or a commingling of shapes, ensconced in an angle of the steps; the which he made out to be his daughter, in her light evening frock with one of his own old army capes over her shoulders, seated in close formation beside the only man at the Post who wore civilian black.
The colonel had the feelings of a man as well as a father. He went back to his letter with a softened look in his face. He had said too much; he always did--to Annie; and now he must hedge a little or she would think there was trouble brewing, and that he was going to be nasty about Moya's choice.

III
THE INITIAL LOVE
"Let us be simple! Not every one can be, but we can. We can afford to be, and we know how!"
Moya was speaking rapidly, in her singularly articulate tones. A reader of voices would have pronounced hers the physical record of unbroken health and constant, joyous poise.
"Hear the word of your prophet Emerson!" she brought a little fist down upon her knee for emphasis, a hand several sizes larger closed upon it and held it fast. "Hear the word--are you listening? 'Only two in the Garden walked and with Snake and Seraph talked.'"
The young man's answer was an instant's impassioned silence. Too close it touched him, that vital image of the Garden. Then, with an effect of sternness, he said,--
"Have we the right to do as we please? Have we the courage that comes of right to cut ourselves off from all those calls and cries for help?"
"I have," said the girl; "I have just that right--of one who knows exactly what she wants, and is going to get it if she can!"
He laughed at her happy insolence, with which all the youth and nature in him made common cause.
"I shouldn't mind thinking about your Poor Man," she tripped along, "if he liked being poor, or if it seemed to improve him any; or if it were only now and then. But there is so dreadfully much of him! Once we begin, how should we ever think about anything else? He'd rise up and sit down with us, and eat and drink with us, and tell us what to wear. Every pleasure of our lives would be spoiled with his eternal 'Where do I come in?' It was simple enough in that garden, with only those two and nobody outside to feel injured. But we are those two, aren't we? Isn't everybody--once in a life, and once only?" She turned her face aside, slighting by her manner the excessive meaning of her words. "I ask for myself only what I think I have a right to give you--my absolute undivided attention for those first few years. They say it never lasts!" she hastened to add with playful cynicism.
Young Bogardus seemed incapable under the circumstances of any adequate reply. Free as they were in words, there was an extreme personal shyness between these proud young persons, undeveloped on the side of passion and better